Al Roker, broadcasting from Vancouver this morning, talked about "Polar Bear tours, right here in Canada!" which is like standing in Seattle and saying "Cajun food and French architecture, right here in America!"

Forgive them; in their heads the US is like this little appendage of Manhattan, and Canada is its smallest state.

Aw cmon... don't you know? It's like global warming man! By the next Winter olympics we won't have ANYWHERE to have them cause like all the snow will be gone man. And we will be all bummered because the polar bears and penguines will all be like dead and stuff.

Sadly, I think I have a few friends who are dumb enough to believe this.

Save your blame for the fracking idjits that gave the games to Vancouver in the first place: The IOC. After all, Van is just the place that ponied up enough cash, hookers and blow to convince them to put the winter olympics in a city that doesn't get much snow.

"Sochi is almost unique among larger Russian cities as having some aspects of a subtropical resort. Apart from the scenic Caucasus Mountains, pebbly and sand beaches, the city attracts vacation-goers with its subtropical vegetation, numerous parks, monuments, and extravagant Stalinist architecture. About two million people visit Greater Sochi each summer,[13] when the city is home to the annual film festival "Kinotavr" and a getaway for Russia's elite."

To investigate the associations among handgun regulations, assault and other crimes, and homicide, we studied robberies, burglaries, assaults, and homicides in Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, from 1980 through 1986. Although similar to Seattle in many ways, Vancouver has adopted a more restrictive approach to the regulation of handguns... We conclude that restricting access to handguns may reduce the rate of homicide in a community.

I'm sure the hockey-stick graph showing the causation of guns and homicide is in some computer at East Anglia's Gun Research Unit.

If the Olympics had been held in gun-saturated Seattle, the biathlon would look something like this.

Predictably, the editors chose to publish Sloan's article with inferior but favorable data claiming erroneously that severe gun-control policies had reduced Canadian homicides. They rejected Centerwall's superior study showing that such policies had not lowered the rate of homicides in Canada: the Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after implementation of a 1977 Canadian law.[4] Moreover, Sloan and associates glossed over the disparate ethnic compositions of Seattle and Vancouver. When the rates of homicides for whites are compared, in both of these cities, it turns out that the rate of homicide in Seattle is actually lower than in Vancouver. The important fact that blacks and Hispanics, who constitute higher proportions of the population in Seattle, have higher rates of homicides in that city was not mentioned.

Centerwall's paper on the comparative rates of homicides in the United States and Canada was finally published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, but his valuable research, unlike that of Sloan and his group, was not made widely available to the public.[5] In contradistinction to his valuable gun-research data, Centerwall's other research pointing to the effects of TV violence on homicide rates has been made widely available; his data exculpating gun availability from high homicide rates in this country remains a closely guarded secret.[6]

Why is it that victim-disarmament supporters are so very violent? I suppose in there case, disarmament is a societal good. Perhaps they do need to be identified, committed to State guardianship, and stripped of the right to possess really dangerous things like rifles or voting ballots, lest the act out on their violent tendencies and cause someone harm.

Ah, yes: The Kellerman study. Comparing two different nations, with different laws; comparing vastly different demographic groups (very wealthy in the neighborhoods picked in Vancouver, the inner city in Seattle), and having somewhat...expanded...definitions of violence.